His Unknown Heir(31)

‘I didn’t want Matty to grow up feeling that he wasn’t good enough to be part of the illustrious Velaquez family.’ She voiced the fear that had gnawed at her. ‘Children need to feel valued.’ It was something she had learned when her father had left and she had realised how unimportant she was to him. ‘Although you might have been willing to marry for duty, I wasn’t.’

‘You thought it better to bring Mateo up without a father?’ Ramon accused her scathingly. ‘What right did you have to deny him one of his parents? Did you ever think about what he might want?’

Lauren paled. She had felt guilty that Matty would grow up without a father, but it had seemed preferable to an uninterested father whom she had feared would regard fatherhood as an irksome duty.

‘And how much more of his life were you going to steal from me?’ Ramon demanded furiously. ‘Would you ever have told me about him?’ His blood ran cold. ‘Or was that chance remark by Alistair Gambrill the only reason I discovered my child’s existence?’

When she did not answer, he glared at her with bitter contempt.

‘Dios! You slept with me last night, and even then you said nothing. What was all that about, anyway? Were you using me as a stud, in the hope of conceiving a sibling for Mateo?’

‘No! Don’t be ridiculous.’ Lauren’s temper flared at his outrageous accusation. ‘You came on to me, if you remember. You danced with me all evening, and took me up to your room.’

‘You came willingly enough.’

‘Only because Guy had upset me. I never intended for things to turn out the way they did.’ She looked away from him, colour flooding her cheeks—because she was lying, she admitted bleakly.

During the ball she had been intensely aware of Ramon, and deep down she had longed for him to take her to his room and make love to her. Even now she was acutely conscious of him. Her traitorous body ached for him to touch her as he had touched her last night. The memory of how he had stroked his hands over her naked flesh and brought her to the peak of arousal with his clever fingers made her limbs tremble.

Ramon raked his hand through his hair and swung away from her, pacing around the small living room like an angry caged bear. ‘Who cares for Mateo while you are at work all day? You told me your mother lives in Jersey, so presumably she is not involved in his upbringing?’

‘He is in a daycare nursery. It’s an excellent nursery—the absolute best,’ she continued quickly, when Ramon frowned. The nursery fees were exorbitant, but she was happy to pay them for peace of mind that Matty was happy and well cared for.

‘And when did you return to work?’

‘When he was three months old.’

‘Dios mio! You dumped him in daycare when he was just three months old?’ There was genuine horror in Ramon’s eyes. ‘My sisters did not leave their babies’ sides for the first years of their lives.’

Lauren gave him a startled look. ‘I didn’t even know you had sisters. In all the months that we were together you never spoke about your family.’

He shrugged. ‘I learned long ago to guard my privacy, and that of my family, after a couple of ex-mistresses blabbed to the tabloids about my personal life. Even the colour scheme of my bathroom seems to be fascinating to some people,’ he added dryly.

But there had been another reason why he had maintained a distance between himself and Lauren, Ramon admitted silently. Over the years he had learned to compartmentalise his life; in Spain he had been the son of a duque, who could never forget the life of duty that lay ahead of him, but in London he had enjoyed a playboy lifestyle. His relationship with Lauren had begun as just another affair with a pretty blonde, and because he had known that that was all it could ever be he had deliberately not allowed his two worlds to mix.

‘You must have known that I wouldn’t do something like that,’ Lauren muttered, hurt by his lack of trust in her. It reinforced the fact that he had regarded her as just another casual lover, and once again she wondered how she had been stupid enough to believe he had started to care for her.

‘Unlike your sisters, I live in the real world,’ she said curtly. ‘I had to go back to work to pay the bills. I’m not saying the situation is ideal, but I have done my very best for Matty. I even used to spend my lunch hour in the ladies’ loo, expressing my breast milk so that the nursery staff could give it to him the next day.’

Her life in the first few months after she’d had Mateo had been a blur of exhaustion, worry, and guilty tears shed silently in the cloakroom at work in between meetings. Ramon would never understand what a terrible wrench she still found it to leave her baby for hours every day.